grep, but only certain file extensions

Question

I am working on writing some scripts to grep certain directories, but these directories contain all sorts of file types.

I want to grep just .h and .cpp for now, but maybe a few others in the future.

So far I have:

{ grep -r -i CP_Image ~/path1/;

grep -r -i CP_Image ~/path2/;

grep -r -i CP_Image ~/path3/;

grep -r -i CP_Image ~/path4/;

grep -r -i CP_Image ~/path5/;} 

| mailx -s GREP [e-mail]

Can anyone show me how I would now add just the specific file extensions?

Answer 1

ag (the silver searcher) has pretty simple syntax for this

       -G --file-search-regex PATTERN
          Only search files whose names match PATTERN.

so

ag -G *.h -G *.cpp CP_Image <path>

Answer 2

Since this is a matter of finding files, let's use find!

Using GNU find you can use the -regex option to find those files in the tree of directories whose extension is either .h or .cpp:

find -type f -regex ".*\.\(h\|cpp\)"
#            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Then, it is just a matter of executing grep on each of its results:

find -type f -regex ".*\.\(h\|cpp\)" -exec grep "your pattern" {} +

If you don't have this distribution of find you have to use an approach like Amir Afghani's, using -o to concatenate options (the name is either ending with .h or with .cpp):

find -type f \( -name '*.h' -o -name '*.cpp' \) -exec grep "your pattern" {} +
#            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

---

And if you really want to use grep, follow the syntax indicated to --include:

grep "your pattern" -r --include=*.{cpp,h}
#                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Answer 3

I am aware this question is a bit dated, but I would like to share the method I normally use to find .c and .h files:

tree -if | grep \\.[ch]\\b | xargs -n 1 grep -H "#include"

or if you need the line number as well:

tree -if | grep \\.[ch]\\b | xargs -n 1 grep -nH "#include"

Answer 4

Some of these answers seemed too syntax-heavy, or they produced issues on my Debian Server. This worked perfectly for me:

PHP Revolution: How to Grep files in Linux, but only certain file extensions?

Namely:

grep -r --include=\*.txt 'searchterm' ./

...or case-insensitive version...

grep -r -i --include=\*.txt 'searchterm' ./

• grep: command

• -r: recursively

• -i: ignore-case

• --include: all *.txt: text files (escape with \ just in case you have a directory with asterisks in the filenames)

• 'searchterm': What to search

• ./: Start at current directory.

Answer 5

grep -rnw "some thing to grep" --include=*.{module,inc,php,js,css,html,htm} ./

Answer 6

Below answer is good.

grep -r -i --include \*.h --include \*.cpp CP_Image ~/path[12345] | mailx -s GREP [e-mail]

But can be updated to:

grep -r -i --include \*.{h,cpp} CP_Image ~/path[12345] | mailx -s GREP [e-mail]

Which can be more simple.